car culture

Green Means More Than Grasping at Straws

Hank Garfield

A silly meme on Facebook – a paper straw in a plastic wrapper titled “The Green movement in a nutshell” – got me thinking about my own environmentalist leanings, and my commitment to not owning a car.

Growing up on the Maine Coast gave me an environmental consciousness I never thought of as political. I instinctively pick up trash and recoil at litter, much of which includes non-recyclable plastic. But while a ton of straws can break a camel’s back, we aren’t going to save the planet by focusing on minutiae like straws. 

What do straws have to do with cars? They both kill turtles, for one thing. But cars do a whole lot more damage than that. Aside from the thousands of people killed yearly in crashes, motor vehicles contribute to a long laundry list of insults to the global ecosystem. They burn finite fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. They necessitate the construction of acres of parking lots, which radiate heat back into the atmosphere, eliminate wetlands, and pollute reservoirs with run-off. They encourage the development of car-centric suburbs with huge per-capita carbon footprints. They foster graveyards of spent tires and dead vehicles that continue to pollute years after they stop moving.

Although I consider myself an environmentalist, I stopped owning cars for none of those reasons. I stopped owning cars because they cost too much money. I resented the idea that I needed a car at my service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There are plenty of cars around. Surely I could find one to use when I needed to, without the economic onus of owning one.

The past 17 years have vindicated this conviction. I now have a savings account instead of a monthly car payment and an ongoing insurance policy. I don’t waste precious minutes of my life sitting in traffic jams. On foot, on a bicycle, or on a bus, I’m healthier and happier than I would be seething and swearing at people from behind a windshield.

It hasn’t come without cost, or without compromises. I have had to adjust my lifestyle and change some habits. I leave ample time to get to the places I need to go, and I sometimes don’t get to other places I want to go. For most of those years, I’ve lived with someone who owned a car. Four months ago, we became a no-car household.

So far, we’ve managed. We did not visit family for Thanksgiving, and we have not yet needed to take the dog to the vet. Have you ever noticed that almost all veterinarians are way out on the edge of town? In October we rented a car and the three of us went to the coast for a weekend, but we can’t jump up and do that on the spur of the moment.

It isn’t only veterinarians. Hardware stores are hard to find anywhere outside of Lowe’s and Home Depot, always built where it’s hard to get to other than by car. The buses stop running before many people get out of work. To live without a car in a small city like Bangor, far from any major metropolitan center, is to endure a multitude of inconveniences.

Are the inconveniences worth the rewards? In my case, the answer was, and is still, “Yes.” But I don’t need a car to get to and from my primary job, and I do much of it on-line. It’s a 15-minute walk to downtown and an even shorter walk to a corner convenience store. Renting a car works out to about a hundred dollars a day, which seems like a lot until you consider that the average annual cost of owning a car is $10,000, equal to 100 car rentals.

I’m lucky, in that I can choose not to own a car. Many don’t have that choice. They either can’t afford one, or can’t drive one, for physical or other reasons. Life is even more inconvenient for them.

Cars are a convenience, and an environmental disaster. Hence the conundrum: how does an environmentally responsible citizen retain the convenience while reducing the harm? Many people are choosing to go electric.

Electric cars are marginally better for the environment, as this article from the New York Times details. But they require lithium and cobalt mining, which aren’t any kinder to the planet than oil rigs and refineries. They will not stop suburban sprawl or the hollowing out of small business districts in favor of outlying big-box stores with massive parking lots.

If we are to be serious about our stewardship of the planet, as I believe we must be, then we can do better than to substitute one environmental disaster for a slightly lesser one. Electric cars won’t do a whole lot of good if we use them the way we use gas-powered cars now.

Instead, we can invest in comprehensive public transportation, promote pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with a mixture of business and residential use, and incentivize development on a human rather than an automotive scale.

Why do you get a straw when you order a glass of water at a bar, anyway? You can drink it just fine without one. Owning a car should not be a necessity. Entrenched interests make it feel like one. We must work toward a world in which alternative choices are equally appealing.

Old, Entrenched Attitudes Die Hard in Car-Centric California

Hank Garfield

This is what we’re up against. 

Fox News recently gave the top of its Web page to an opinion piece by San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, under this screen-spanning headline: “San Diego wants to tax people out of their cars and into public transportation.”

My first reaction: It’s about time.

Desmond lives in Oceanside, California. I used to live there. He came to North San Diego County in 1984, a year after I did. Companies were investing in new business parks near freeway ramps and surrounded by parking lots. The area had a decent bus network, and a commuter train along the coast. But little effort was made to integrate the outlying business parks with public transit, giving all those employees little choice but to drive, and exacerbating already bad traffic congestion.

After sixteen years, I gave up on California and moved back to Maine, a place with much less traffic but also fewer options. In both places, the so-called choice of driving is, for many people, hardly a choice at all.

The language Desmond uses is telling. He charges that San Diego’s most recent regional transportation plan is “designed to make driving so expensive that you succumb to public transportation.” I’m sorry, but “succumb”? It’s usually the other way around. People who want to use public transit are forced to reluctantly buy a car. For most of my adult life, I “succumbed” to the idea that car ownership was a necessity of modern American life. Every government transportation incentive over the past fifty years has encouraged driving and discouraged the development of alternatives.

Desmond trots out several dated and debunked arguments to prop up his position:

Desmond: “Government agendas should not be used to change behavior by taxing us into fixed-rail trains and buses. Instead of changing behavior, government entities should incentivize technology and innovation.” 

Slower Traffic: When Maine passed its returnable bottle law in 1976, people stopped throwing bottles from car windows. The bottles and cans that lined many roadways disappeared within months. Littering was already illegal, but sometimes people need a nudge from government to do the right thing. 

History abounds with examples of this, from civil rights to workplace safety to smoking in bars and restaurants. Governments pass laws, which in turn influence behavior. It’s ridiculous to argue that government should not and cannot be an agent for positive change.

Desmond: “Government should embrace what most people are already choosing, and make it cleaner, safer, and more efficient.  The people have spoken, they choose freedom of movement and not broken promises or additional taxes.”

Slower Traffic: This is a classic circular argument. People choose cars because government transportation policy encourages this choice and punishes others. Car owners are, as the late Jane Holtz Kay documented in her 1997 book Asphalt Nation, “responding to a rigged market… price supports for ring roads, beltways, and free parking… taxes and infrastructure that promote far-flung highways and suburban homes.” If the nearest grocery store is more than a mile away, and your job is in a business park surrounded by parking lots but nowhere near a bus stop, are you really making a free choice, or bowing to a de facto requirement? The people have not “spoken.” They’ve obeyed.

Desmond: Who will this affect the most? The lowest income earners. The math is simple, those that earn less will pay a disproportionately higher percentage of their income to get to where they need to go.

Slower Traffic: Lower earners already pay a larger percentage of their income on transportation. This has been true for decades. It’s still cheaper to take the bus than to own a car. Shifting money from the car system to public transit via taxation can help level the playing field. But this is exactly what Desmond opposes. 

Our motor vehicles and their ancillary services are a cumulative environmental disaster. Cars aren’t going away anytime soon, but doesn’t it make sense to soften their impact, on both the climate and our overall quality of life? I don’t know anyone who enjoys the stop-and-go freeway traffic I lived with every day in California. San Diego has, to its credit, expanded its trolley system, and built a downtown baseball stadium that replaced the one in the conglomeration of freeways and parking lots of Mission Valley. (Full disclosure: I voted for the ballpark, which passed 60-40% in 1998.) 

Public transportation is the future. But people like Desmond seem determined to stand in the way. 

Are we Driving Ourselves to the Poorhouse?

Hank Garfield

 

Maine is famous for low wages and small towns. Those small towns have been losing population for decades. When I was growing up in Blue Hill, families with five, six, or more children were common. Last year, deaths outnumbered births in all but two of Maine’s 16 counties.

My parents had five kids and two cars. My father drove one of those cars a mile and a half to work, where it sat in a parking lot all day. My mother used the other one to haul groceries and to take us to doctor’s appointments and such. Almost everybody we knew lived like this.

It’s hard to question a lifestyle when you’re living inside it. I anticipated that I would buy a car as soon as I got my license, and that I would spend my working years as a car owner. It took many years of driving and pouring money into a series of vehicles before I began to think seriously about alternatives.

Thus I sympathize with the young woman whose story appeared recently in the Bangor Daily News, my hometown newspaper. She is by all accounts a skilled elder care worker with a full-time job at a Bangor facility. Her salary – about $1,600 per month – barely covers her basic living expenses. Her story is repeated all over the state.

And yet, according to the BDN, those basic expenses include a monthly car payment of $233 and an insurance premium of $135. Before she puts gas in the car, or buys a set of tires or has an oil change or a minor repair, she has to make a monthly “nut” of $368 just to keep the thing in the driveway. And that doesn’t include registration, inspection, wiper fluid, parking tickets or any of the other little expenses that crop up from time to time. She is paying more for her car than for her monthly rent, and many Mainers are in the same boat.

Her hours may not align with the schedule, but her place of employment is right on a bus line. A monthly bus pass is $45 – a far cry from what she’s paying to keep a car.

These were just some of the major branches of lowest price tadalafil psychology, new branches are being introduced with time to help us understand different life aspects more easily. They are loaded with sugar and caffeine is the subsequent most copious substance in them that, similar to alcohol, gives you can look here levitra without prescription rise to water failure inside your body. These are easily available at generic viagra for woman any registered medical store located in near region. This is an added advantage for men who are younger, men in their 40s, or even their 30s, who didn’t think that someone their age could ever suffer from Erectile Dysfunction. generic tadalafil india is an excellent product which helps a person to overcome erectile dysfunction form their life. If Maine employers want to keep skilled workers, they could raise their wages, of course – or, they could encourage them to use public transportation. The University of Maine has been doing this for years, and Husson and Eastern Maine Community College have recently followed suit. As an adjunct professor, I have months during the year when I make less than $1,600. Those times are tight, but I never have to worry about getting to work.

Municipalities can help retain workers by expanding bus schedules and encouraging employers to offer incentives like the schools do. Even small towns can do this, with a little creative thinking

Most employers willingly offer free workplace parking. What if they offered free transportation instead? This is essentially what the University of Maine does and, except for evening hours, it works splendidly. Some companies (though few, if any, in Maine) offer their employees parking offsets, where the price of a parking space is reflected in the paychecks of workers who don’t use one.

The Jackson Lab in Bar Harbor partners with public agencies to run several daily buses. This reduces traffic on Mount Desert Island and the need for more on-site parking. The bus is a boon to the employees who use it, too, because every dollar they don’t spend on a car trickles into other areas of the economy. It’s good for everybody.

We need to think differently about the way we use cars. We don’t all need our own private chariots all of the time, and we certainly can’t keep doing it forever. But it will take time to convince most Americans of this. Most of us have spent our whole lives believing exactly the opposite.

A changing mindset about our use of automobiles will produce other long-term benefits. We won’t have to keep filling our cities with parking lots. We won’t have to keep paying oil companies to drill for more and more oil in fragile ecosystems like the Arctic. And perhaps we can fight fewer wars over this finite resource.

Yes, Maine needs better wages. But businesses and local governments can also expend a little capital to promote ride-sharing, public transportation, and smart development. This in turn can encourage more Mainers to get out of the cars that are keeping them poorer than they should be.

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